The RIB: An Unlikely Coven by AM Kvita
This is the first novel by AM Kvita. Overall, fun, a touch of cozy, with queer found family tropes. I had some world-building hang-ups, but it's more of a character piece.
Our protagonist, Joan Greenwood, comes from the ruling witch family of New York, and yet she's got a distant relationship with them. While Joan can channel magic, she can't shape the magic into spells, which makes her useless in their eyes. The book opens with Joan waiting to be picked up at Central Station by her family, but alas, no one comes. No one, except her BFF, the vampire CZ! (CZ is one of those ‘naturalborn' vampires - they can have families and relationships and don't appear to have a lot of the classic vampire hang-ups, apart from blood-drinking.)
Joan and CZ, both gay, have a great friendship dynamic with plenty of warmth and snarky banter. Anyway, Joan finally returns home and discovers the reason her family forgot to pick her up. There's a crisis on: a mortal cast a spell! If mere humans can learn magic, then the ruling power of the ruling witch families will be lost! Everyone is searching for this new upstart, and their experiments could end the human's life. When CZ finds the person—the non-binary Mik—before the Greenwoods do, Joan has to make a choice between her family or an ordinary person's life.
The book dips into witch politics and encounters with the different ruling families, and Joan's struggle to protect Mik. Her plan is to remove Mik's ability to cast magic, thereby making them normal again so that Mik is no longer a target of the powers. Once the book gets going, it's a breezy read and explores Joan's relationship with her family, and her attraction to one of the witches hunting Mik, the tough Astoria Wardell, who's the heir of the Californias' ruling witch family.
I think my issue was that I wanted to explore other characters rather than Joan. Poor Mik gets no agency, apart from being sick with magic all the time. Wouldn't it be more exciting if an ordinary person could become a witch? And while CZ is cool and supportive, he doesn't seem to transcend being Joan's campy BFF. Still, Kvita is great with dialogue, and the side characters, such as Molly (Joan's sister) and Abel the occult researcher (CZ's brother), are lively and interesting. Still, there were a few sequences, particularly when Joan is captured by the villain, where it would have been good to hop into other heads to see what else was going on.
It also took a few chapters to get going. First, there's a lot of exposition in the first chapter about the supernatural world, talking about how many millions of fae, vampires, and witches there are, and yet the text implies a sort of masquerade setting. Or at least, there's raw magic everywhere, but it can sicken normal humans, so the supernatural world has its own pocket areas of society, such as the HERMES magical subway, and the Night Markets. I was keen to see how the two halves of the world interact, but it remains a bit blurry.
The book is at its best exploring the cozy dynamic between the characters as Joan struggles with intrigue and family politics that pushes her from her comfort zone into exploring her previously hidden powers. It's going to be interesting to see how Kvita develops her world and characters in future books.